Download LEARNING and MEMORY

LEARNING and MEMORY
Genes
(Instinct)
European
Ethologists
Learning
Behavior
American
Psychologists
humans
learn
Which animals learn?
ALL?
(Def.) Learning is a relatively long-lasting modification
of behavior due to experience or practice.
Can We Generalize??
What types of animals rely more on instinct?
What types strongly benefit from their ability to learn?
New Caledonian Crow
Magpie
SUPER-SMART … CONSCIOUS??
Scrub Jay
Parrot
Instinctual
Behavior
GENES …
- endow every animal with behavioral potential
- determine an animal’s sensory world
- determine an animal’s capacity to learn
MEMORY
Learning requires it!
short-term … long-term memory
Examples of animal long-term memory??
Migrating Pacific salmon
Salmon life cycle
END
BEGIN
Recall
Memory
Formation
We’ll consider the following types of learning:
- habituation “nonassociative learning”
- classical conditioning
“associative learning”
- operant conditioning
- avoidance learning
- imprinting
- spatial learning
- cultural = observational learning
Learning Type 1: Habituation
Fading of an unlearned response to a novel stimulus
that proves safe or irrelevant.
(Requires repetitive exposure to the stimulus)
EXAMPLES ??
EXAMPLE: Peckham & Peckham (1894) struck
a tuning fork in front of an orb-weaving spider.
Habituation as a factor in predation??
Predator
Prey
Response to Threatening Stimuli
Nereis
a marine annelid living in sediments
WATER
OCEAN FLOOR
Response to Threatening Stimuli
Nereis
a marine annelid living in sediments
WATER
OCEAN FLOOR
Habituation of Nereis to 2 stimuli
Stimulus-specificity
% of
Worms
Reacting
.
Time-sensitivity
EXAMPLE: YCP Senior Thesis by Becky Brown
Were Tyler Run minnows at the road
crossing habituated to car spray?
crossing vs downstream minnows’ reactions to spray
car
spray
zone
car
crossing
TYLER
RUN
pool
HUMANITIES
YCP
Blacknose
Dace
Becky
with
Supersoaker
Record Swimming Activity
- before spray
- after spray
BECKY’S
DATA
Swimming
Activity
Reaction of YCP Tyler Run Minnows
to a water spray disturbance
Road-crossing Minnows
Downstream Minnows
35
30
25
Recovery
20
15
10
No Recovery
5
0
0
2
4
6
8
10 12 14 16 18 20
Minutes
Minutes
Water
Spray
Aplysia
- Behavioraly simple
- Simple nervous system
- Large neurons
- Hardy/inexpensive
Learning
Research
Focus on synaptic efficacy
= amplitude of EPSP in response to a
pre-synaptic AP
Some synapses may show antifacilitation
Aplysia Habituation
Learning in Aplysia
HABITUATION
Habituation
Aplysia
circuitry
(siphon)
Reason: less transmitter
Antifacilitation
http://www.sumanasinc.com/webcontent/animations/neurobiology.html
SENSITIZATION
Head
or
(from siphon
skin)
Stays open
longer
more
transmitter
release
(for gill withdrawal)
Restored
Excitation
Learning Type 2: Classical Conditioning
Neutral
stimulus
US = meat powder
UR = salivation
CLASSICAL CONDITIONING Vocab
Stimulus
(= Unconditioned Stimulus)
Neutral Stimulus
Response
(= Unconditioned Response)
+ US
UR
training
“Neutral” Stimulus
(= conditioned stimulus)
CS
“UR”
(= conditioned response)
CR
Simple nervous systems are
capable of
- classical conditioning
- operant conditioning
McConnell’s Flatworms
Planaria
Learning Type 3: Operant Conditioning
(= trial & error learning = instrumental learning)
Animal comes to associate its behavior with the
consequences of the behavior.
Consequences are either …
1)something good (e.g., food)
2)something bad (e.g., electric shock)
B.F. Skinner
- Helped popularize behaviorism
- Operant conditioning pioneer
- Invented the Skinner Box to study learning
BAR-pressing is
the task
(+) reinforcement
= food pellets
(-) reinforcement
= electric current
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQtDTdDr8vs
Behavior can be shaped by
reinforcing successive
approximations
+
Operant Conditioning
in Flatworms
Learning Type 4: Avoidance Learning
Recognizing, from experience, a dangerous
or unpleasant situation and avoiding it.
Most-studied example:
Conditioned Taste Aversion (CTA)
Animal associates discomfort or illness with
food/drink
Result: future encounters with that food will
be avoided.
CTA Demonstration
1) Animal shows a willingness to consume a flavored drink.
2) Animal samples the drink … then is made sick.
3) After recovery, animal declines opportunities to consume the
drink.
1-trial learning!! POWERFUL !!
Examples??
Rats avoiding poison
Predators avoiding …
monarch butterflies
some toads
gila monster lizards
Rehnberg & Cassolet
Rehnberg & Sherry
Your own experience?
Eggs Cannot Thermoregulate !!
Brood
Patch
Post-doc
Taste Research at the UCONN Health Center
Q: How do hamsters perceive sweet tastes?
Strategy: CTA Methodology
Rejex-it® Migrate (formerly AG 36) is a tool for
the behavior modification of Canada geese
(Branta Candensis). As a taste aversion agent,
Rejex it Migrate changes the taste of the grass
to become unpalatable to geese. This causes
the geese to leave the area completely to find
better feeding and living conditions. Rejex-it®
Migrate is only distasteful as long as the grass
remains treated. The effect is not systemic, so
as the grass grows retreatment is needed to
maintain control.
Not CTA
3 Nobel Laureates in 1973!!
Learning Type 5:
Imprinting
Learning Type 5: Imprinting
A rapid and irreversible attraction or affiliation to an
organism(s) or place that happens early in life.
Filial Imprinting
Critical Period
Konrad Lorenz & water fowl
Imprinting Reversal
HOME
IMPRINTING
Salmon
Hatchery
Imprinting to odors
of natal stream
Critical Period??
SMOLT STAGE
Pacific Ocean
(Reproductive Migration of Pacific Salmon)
Salmon River Hatchery
Learning Type 6: Spatial Learning
Recognizing and remembering features of home area
or territory to allow accurate movements.
Widespread ...
• Animals that leave nest to find food or mates and then
return home
• Animals that store food must find it later
Simple Spatial Learning
?
Morris Water Maze Test
for spatial memory
The Barnes Maze
Finding Stored Food
Family Corvidae (crows & jays) are powerful spatial learners
Example: Clark’s Nutcracker
High mountain habitat: Must find stored seeds in winter
Find food ……… Cache (hide) it ………. Find it later
Clark’s Nutcracker
… requires memory of location … which
resulted from spatial learning.
MEMORY DEMONSTRATION EXPERIMENT
Large room …
330 holes in floor
central feeder
rocks, logs, etc. on floor
Bird allowed to cache seeds in holes on Day 0
9.5 months !!
On Days 11, 82, 183, & 285 birds did better than random!!
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F
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OK … where did I park my car 15 minutes ago?
Seed Caching in 3 Species of Western Corvids (crows)
Species
Elevation
Clark’s nutcracker highest
Winter
diet
100% cached
Cached
seeds/yr
33,000
Pinyon jay
middle
70-90
20,000
Scrub jay
lowest
??
6,000
M
E
M
O
R
y
(remembering locations
on a computer monitor)
M
E
M
O
R
y
(remembering colors on
a computer monitor)
Spatial memory region in the brain??
HIPPOCAMPUS
(Birds & Mammals)
Clark Nutcrackers
After bilateral lesions of the hippocampus, caching behavior
is normal …….
but retrieval is lost!!
Published
YCP Thesis
Test Arena for Spatial Memory of Gerbils
Better-than-chance performance at day 110
*
*
Chronically-implanted
electrode in a place cell
Place cells are hippocampal neurons
that fire when animal is in a specific
part of a familiar spatial area
2
3
4
5
1
6
7
Simultaneous recordings from 7 place cells in the CA1 layer of the rat
hippocampus. Recorded while the rat ran hundreds of laps around a triangular
track. The rat stopped in the middle of each side to eat rewards. Black dots
show position of head … colors represent responses by different place cells.
Learning Type 6: Cultural Learning
(= observational learning)
Learning by observing what another animal is doing.
Learning by "copying".
BUT…….. it’s more than momentary imitation.
The learned behavior may appear some time after the
original observation(s).
EXAMPLE: Imo was a female Japanese macaque that
was the source of new food-cleaning techniques.
Imo introduced washing sweet potatoes to remove grit.
She also introduced the washing of wheat grains: float
them and the grit sinks.
These behaviors spread slowly through the group.
passage from Drickamer, p. 177
http://www.arkive.org/japanese-macaque/macaca-fuscata/video-08c.html
E
X
A
M
P
L
E
Blackbirds
Australian honey guide
Blackbird
Learning Type 4: Insight Learning
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/15a1e3cb2ff62535?projector=1
Insight Learning
Formulating new behaviors or solutions to problems by
thinking about them.
May require making mental models or simulations to
discover hypothetical outcomes
- Most advanced?
- Consciousness?
- Taxonomically limited
- Animal evidence limited & controversial
Insight
Learning
Kohler’s
chimps
New Caledonian
Crow
Insight Learning?
Operant Conditioning?
“Mere” Instinct?
Preparedness
Preparedness is an animal's genetically-determined
predisposition to learn.
Preparedness is task-specific and species-specific.
Example: Rat preparedness
- Prepared: taste aversion comes very easy for rats.
- Unprepared: learning a complex bar-pressing protocol
to receive food pellet. (takes training)
- Contraprepared: pressing levers to avoid electric
shock. Rats are prepared to run when shocked.
The
END